THERE IS NOTHING LIKE THIS DAME

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MAGGIE SMITH - OR DAME MAGGIE SMITH, TO USE HER NEWLY ACQUIRED TITLE - approaches the Hyatt Carlton Tower hotel in Knightsbridge, showily twirling her left arm in the air. A grand theatrical gesture from a star whose career has shown no shortage of them? Perhaps, but this time, there's an element of triumph in the motion: the notorious arm whose injury partly caused the Broadway postponement of ''Lettice and Lovage'' for a year, is on the mend, and Maggie Smith wants to illustrate its recovery with a flourish. Its theatricality well suits the actress's current role as the extravagant, middle-aged spinster, Lettice Douffet, in the play opening next Sunday at the Ethel Barrymore Theater.

Over the past three decades, the 55-year-old actress has appeared infrequently on Broadway, but as a film star in the United States, she's one of the few British performers to exert box-office clout on both sides of the Atlantic. In Britain, by contrast, she's primarily a stage actress; significantly, she was unable personally to accept her 1969 Academy Award for ''The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie'' because she was opening in George Farquhar's Restoration comedy ''The Beaux' Stratagem'' in London that night. Maggie Smith's commitment to the theater is hardly unique among her peers. Vanessa Redgrave, Glenda Jackson and Diana Rigg are just three contemporary leading actresses, all also in their 50's, who return regularly to the London stage. But Smith's theatrical terrain is distinctive, her selection of roles perhaps the most purely English. Indeed, the American repertory has remained a largely closed book. Nor, despite attempts at Hedda Gabler and Lady Macbeth over a decade ago, is tragedy her forte.

Still, Smith is more than a gifted vaudevillian, feeding audiences stage business she knows they'll adore. At her best, in the roles that challenge her most, she's capable of great poignance, tempered with wit - whether as the fevered Oscar nominee on screen in ''California Suite,'' the film that in 1978 brought her a second Oscar, or as Peter Shaffer's willfully exuberant protagonist of ''Lettice and Lovage.''

In other words, she can quell a laugh as well as encourage one. The director William Gaskill cites a moment from the proposal scene of Congreve's comedy ''The Way of the World,'' which he directed in London in 1984 with Smith as Millamant: ''She was slightly nervous, and, talk about the ability to kill laughs, she had the line, 'And lastly, wherever I am, you shall always knock at the door before you come in.' As she said 'lastly,' she dropped her voice a pitch as if to say to the audience, 'The next bit is going to be quite serious, and you must take it seriously.' The line was suddenly full of feeling.''

Says Alan Bennett, who has written both a movie, ''A Private Function,'' and a television play, ''Talking Heads: Bed Among the Lentils,'' for Britain's principal comic siren: ''The boundary between laughter and tears is . . . where Maggie is poised always.''

BUT IT IS A MOVABLEJU boundary. In 1986, she played a poison-tongued, debauched Jocasta in Jean Cocteau's ''Infernal Machine,'' a performance closer in spirit to the Noel Coward heroines of her past than to the role's neo-classical precedents in the plays of Jean Racine. Wrote Martin Hoyle in The Financial Times: ''One charitably assumes Miss Smith resorts to inappropriate clowning in moments of uncertainty, or possibly mutiny. At any rate, she tilts the play's balance precariously towards the over-arch.''

Uncertainty? Mutiny? Or perhaps something else. ''She starts divinely and then goes off, rather like cheese,'' says Jeremy Brett, who has acted with her at the National Theater and at the Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Ontario. ''She finds it very difficult to sustain parts.'' Or in the words of the producer Derek Granger, a former theater critic for The Financial Times who has known Smith more than 20 years: ''She has enormous integrity except when she goes over the top after three months because she's bored with it.'

On stage, unbored, this over-actress can also lend eloquence to the quietest movement. The arm-flailing and wrist-wringing she brings to Lettice Douffet make apparent only one side of her; the other is the Maggie Smith of Bennett's ''Bed Among the Lentils,'' her distinguished 50-minute solo television performance in 1988, playing the alcoholic wife of a vicar, rescued by her sad-eyed wit. The final 10 minutes constitute a memorable sequence in which her smile widens defiantly the more her heart breaks.

Maggie Smith's frailty is deceptive; although small and fine-boned, she's always imposing on stage. In ''The Way of the World,'' she was a crinolined comic figure, swooping about the stage in a fit of near-hysterical distraction before altering the mood with a shift in her tone of voice. Stephen Poliakoff's ''Coming in to Land,'' seen at the National in 1987, cast her as a Polish emigre in London who draped herself like a desperate sylph across the immigration officer's desk. Gestural detail was central to both performances. Comments Robin Phillips, artistic director of Stratford in Ontario when Smith was there: ''She has very, very witty elbows.''

Portraying Lettice, a tour guide who seeks refuge from her dreary present in her technicolor embellishments of history and fantasy, Smith in London risked submerging the part in a barrage of comic bits -limbs forever in mid-flight, that back-of-the-throat nasality forever barbed. But she knows when to quit and bring the audience up short.

Informed halfway through Act 1 that she must seek out another job because of the bizarre excesses of her tour narratives, Smith's face slackened, her voice went parched: ''And where do you imagine I shall find that - at my age?'' she barked in desperation at her employer, Lotte Schoen (Margaret Tyzack). The desolate woman behind the theatrics was suddenly laid bare; the moment sowed the seeds for the friendship that would blossom between these two women, who found rapport over the cups of lovage they brewed.

''Lettice wants to brighten the whole world, but, yes, I suppose she is in a way sad, though she wouldn't admit to it; I don't think she ever thinks she's sad.'' Maggie Smith is sipping afternoon tea in a London hotel suite 16 floors above the elegant squares and enclosed gardens of Chelsea. ''Her ebullience is there all the time, but I mean it is sad. It's very hard for people like that to find employment.'' She stops. ''It's very hard for everybody to find employment.''

EMPLOYMENT HASJU not proven difficult in Maggie Smith's career. As we talk, in January, she seems relieved, more than anything else, at last to be opening Peter Shaffer's comedy on Broadway. Originally, the opening was to have been in January 1989, which was pushed back to April.

Then the accident: On Nov. 29, 1988, in the final week of a vacation in the British Virgin Islands, Smith fell off a bicycle, fracturing her shoulder and upper arm.

Smith returned home to her Sussex farmhouse only to be dealt a second, more serious setback - the worsening of a condition known as Graves' disease, a hyperthyroidism that had been diagnosed in January 1988, early in the run of ''Lettice.'' Medication, and determination, enabled her to play out her yearlong contract (missing only one performance), but the facial disfigurement that resulted - protrusion of the eyeballs and puffiness around the eyes, in particular - was not getting better. What ensued were 12 months of near isolation, during which the actress underwent radiotherapy and the bruises and stitches of eye surgery to stem the protrusion, and, since last May, swam an hour a day to limber up the arm.

Maggie Smith wraps a long index finger around her teacup, leaving untouched the cakes and sandwiches. Of Graves' disease, she quips, ''It's named for the man [a 19th-century Irish physician] , not the place.'' But, minutes later: ''It's been kind of like a fog of despair, really. It was ghastly having a broken arm; ghastly with the play, letting everybody down; and on top of that, I looked absolutely frightening, and didn't know which way to turn.'' In a way, 1989 cruelly justified this actress's reputation as a worrier. After all, when your natural tendency is toward alarm and then things really don't go well, it's difficult to know whether to feel vindicated - or doubly alarmed.

MAGGIE SMITHJU acts more easily than she lives. As Alan Bennett points out: ''She's funny in that she regards her whole life as a succession of disasters. She once defined the appeal of acting: 'You've created a person, and I don't think you ever can create yourself; it's kind of a mess, isn't it? I am, anyway.' ''

The attraction to the profession hasn't changed. ''I think,'' she says, her piercing blue eyes invisible behind glasses tinted to hide her scars, ''it's because you know what you're going to be doing at a certain time of the day. Someone calls, 'Half an hour,' and you know exactly what you're going to put on; you don't have to say, 'What am I going to wear today?' You know who you're going to see; you mercifully know your lines. There is a great security in the theater, funnily enough.''

But if Maggie Smith knows why she acts, she's reluctant or unable to say how - wary, perhaps, that such discussions will make her self-conscious about a process she believes to be instinctual. Partly, it seems clear, her craft lies in the comic timing developed in her early years of doing revues, when you've got just minutes to make an impression before your number ends. Unlike Redgrave or Jackson, who studied at London drama academies, Smith was sharpening her talent on stage at the Edinburgh Festival doing sketch work in front of the harshest audience - the paying public.

As a result, Maggie Smith is not one to wait to make an on-stage impression; she mines each moment, no matter how large or small the part. In Peter Shaffer's ''The Private Ear'' (1962), she played an inarticulate stenographer on a first date, who made clear her social unease by slowly moving her arm around and scratching her spine. ''The house became riveted on this thumb,'' Shaffer recalls. In ''Interpreters,'' playing a self-described ''old maid of Whitehall,'' she brought down the house with a game of footsie that became an under-the-table slapstick routine; the questing prods of her feet turned to horror on her face as she realized she was poking the wrong man. Ronald Harwood, who wrote the play, didn't conceive the scene acted quite so broadly, but he says he didn't mind what Smith did with it. ''I'm rather vulgar; it wasn't too much for me.''

Peter Shaffer remembers her confessing to him late one night in a taxi: ''You know, I suppose I go too far on the stage sometimes and it's wrong and one shouldn't, but it's better than not going far enough.''

The start of ''Lettice and Lovage'' finds Maggie Smith the consummate stand-up comedienne, seen guiding four groups of hapless tourists through a history of Wiltshire's Fustian House that gets more fanciful as the short scenes progress. Small wonder that by the time Margaret Tyzack, her co-star, arrives, all she can do is stare, amazed, at these theatrics.

''For comedy, it seems to me a lot of it is what the eye sees,'' Smith says. ''I don't know whether it's got anything to do with spending quite a lot of one's life in costume - maybe I just got used to body language.''

The actress is reluctant to be drawn out on her mannerisms - an elongated arm here, a protracted syllable there - an issue that has bedeviled her career.

''It's a word I hate and wish could be struck out because one does get stuck with them,'' Smith says. ''But on the other hand, everybody has them.'' She refutes my assertion that there is a definable Maggie Smith role, offering counter-examples to all my suggestions. ''You actually end up doing what you get given, what you get offered, and it could be anything. What's nice is people don't automatically think of you as a certain type'' - another pause - ''but maybe they do for all I know; maybe they think I am a type.

''There's nothing you can do about that at all unless somebody comes along with a vivid imagination.''

Today, Maggie Smith is the only leading British actress of her generation, after her friend and ''Room With a View'' co-star, Judi Dench, to have been made a dame. Certainly, in a country rife with acting dynasties, her background gave no indication of what lay ahead. She was born Margaret Smith in Ilford, east of London, the third child and only daughter of a pathologist. She was five when the family moved to Oxford where her father, now 87, still lives.

Her twin elder brothers became architects, while she headed toward the theater - an interest, she says, that ''just surprised everyone,'' as it seems still to surprise herself. By age 17, Smith was playing Viola in a 1952 Oxford University Dramatics Society staging of ''Twelfth Night,'' where she was seen by the man whom she married 23 years later: Beverley Cross, a writer and one-time actor.

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''She was totally unique in not speaking that kind of Oxford theatrical voice, in the days when everybody was impersonating Olivier,'' he says. ''I thought, 'There you go; that's someone very special; that's someone worth watching.' She was very striking with that red hair, very thin, very tall.'' Also ''very vulnerable, and very, very funny.''

So funny that she quickly got cast in that now-dormant art form, revue, where she found herself ''suddenly whizzing around doing musical numbers, which was not really what I had in mind.'' One show, ''On the Fringe,'' traveled to Scotland and back to London, boasting the newly named Maggie Smith.

''Everybody called me Maggie anyway, so I left it at that, and it looked all right in revue.'' (London Equity already listed a Margaret Smith.) ''I suppose it looks a bit funny now, but it's easy to remember.'' She hesitates. ''I suppose.''

The Broadway producer Leonard Sillman saw ''On the Fringe'' in the

West End and was so impressed that he hired Smith to go to New York, where she was the lone Briton in the revue ''New Faces of 1956.'' ''I think Leonard was under this mad illusion that I could sing.'' Her two subsequent visits to Broadway billed her as an above-the-title star - in Noel Coward's ''Private Lives'' in 1975 and Tom Stoppard's ''Night and Day'' in 1979. Each play earned her a Tony nomination for Best Actress.

By the 60's, she had defected from revues to the West End, and then on to the National Theater at the Old Vic, under Laurence Olivier's artistic directorship.

''Looking back - which is the only thing one seems to do now - it was just thrilling,'' she says. ''You'd do 'Othello' one night, and doing 'Hay Fever' the next was like going on holiday. You'd suddenly be in this wonderful short, sharp play instead of staggering around. Just the whole variety of it was terrific.''

Smith made theatrical waves in ''Hay Fever'' in 1964, directed by Noel Coward, dominating a cast that included Dame Edith Evans. As Myra, she delivered the seemingly straightforward remark ''This haddock is disgusting,'' with a surprisingly comic depth of feeling. Her inflection of the line has since become a part of theater lore.

But the acclaim was a mixed blessing for the actress, who had difficulty, she says, ''ever making it funny again.''

''The fact that everybody was waiting for the line to be said became ludicrous.''

Over the years, comedy would become simultaneously her great strength and her curse, and by the time she opened in London in ''Private Lives'' nearly a decade later, some thought the technique had turned self-congratulatory: double takes attenuated to triple their natural length.

In 1976, now married to Beverley Cross, she joined the Stratford Festival in Canada, to get both her art and her life in order. Reeling from her divorce after eight years of marriage to the actor Robert Stephens, she spent four seasons acting a repertory embracing Shakespeare, Congreve, Chekhov and Edna O'Brien. In the end, she moved back to Britain, largely because of her two sons by Stephens: ''There came a time to decide whether they were going to play ice hockey or cricket,'' she says, ''so they ended up going back to school here.''

MAGGIE SMITHJU does not invite publicity, so it's no accident, as she comments wryly, that ''people always think I'm somewhere else; I mean I'm quite sure they think I'm somewhere else now - out of sight, out of mind.'' Between jobs, she can usually be found reading, walking and being domestic at the 15th-century Sussex farmhouse she and Cross bought nine years ago. There, she's a 20-minute drive from her close friend Lady Olivier - the actress Joan Plowright - and Sir Alec Guinness, another friend, isn't far either. Journalists, however, aren't welcome, nor are they at her Chelsea flat, where her sons - Christopher, 22, and Toby, 20 - are living while they attend drama school.

All of which explains why I find myself eight days after our first interview at another hotel, the Basil Street, once again awaiting Dame Maggie for tea. (''It's very aging, of course,'' she says in passing of her New Year's investiture as a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire, the equivalent of a knighthood. ''It doesn't change anything at all, except people end up calling me Dame Maggie - and I don't suppose that'll happen much.'') She arrives looking drawn and considerably more pressured than she did the previous week, although today's glasses are clear, a result of the removal two days earlier of all but one of the stitches around her eyes. The stress, however, has taken its toll, and the exigencies of the press are - understandably - not foremost in her mind. ''How long will this be?'' she asks testily, before we proceed upstairs.

That morning's International Herald Tribune has a lengthy article about Barbara Bush and her struggle with Graves' disease, and once we've sat down, I show Smith the piece, which she reads with sympathy and interest. She has, it seems, already written a condolence letter to ''poor Mrs. Bush'' but isn't sure whether the President's wife will yet have seen it amid what must be ''an awful lot of mail, and I would think all about this.

''It just kind of leaps out at you. It's very, very - so - demoralizing,'' Smith says by way of empathic commentary to the article. Her eye drifts to an item across the page. '' 'Annie 2' Flunks Tryout,'' she quotes, sounding as if the words are being scraped out of her larynx. She then adds her own ''I see,'' delivered with the epigrammatic finesse of Noel Coward's Amanda in ''Private Lives.''

She throws her coat over the armrest, lights a cigarette and nestles in one corner of the sofa. Maggie Smith is in repose, having stilled - at least for the moment - the tension that feeds her work.

''She genuinely agonizes over a very large talent,'' says Peter Shaffer, who first met her in 1962 when she starred in his West End double bill ''The Private Ear'' and ''The Public Eye.'' Three years later, she appeared in his play ''Black Comedy.'' By now, after ''Lettice and Lovage,'' Shaffer feels he knows well a way of working which Smith herself is loath to explain.

''Maggie's not relaxed at all, ever. She stands all the time and walks up and down, and will keep this up from 10 to 5. Other people are eating sandwiches, and there's this lone figure at the back of the stage, pacing like a caged creature. There is no such thing as a coffee break with Miss Smith.''

Movies are evidently no less taxing. ''She used to get so unhappy, she'd burst into tears,'' says Michael Caine, her ''California Suite'' co-star. ''She has doubts about herself. It seems almost an insurance against greatness; she's supremely unself-confident''

Some performers find their task becomes easier with time; not she: ''I really don't know why acting gets more difficult. I don't know whether it's because each production you do, a lot of critics are going to see you all over again. It's like doing exams, almost. You're constantly trying to get it right, but you face the firing squad each time.''

Working with an actress as highly strung - and stylistically singular - as Maggie Smith, can be a mixed blessing for other performers. Says the playwright Ronald Harwood: ''If Maggie likes another actor's kind of acting, she'll do anything to help that performance; if she finds it in any way boring or tedious, that other actor might as well not exist.''

Harwood cites her preference for ''glamorous'' or ''professional'' acting, and no one thinks she suffers lightweights, or fools, easily. ''She can get impatient with people,'' says William Gaskill, the director. ''When someone knows how to do something and get it right, they don't always understand why other people don't understand. She does outclass a lot of the people she plays with, particularly the men, I'm afraid. . . . To find someone who can stand up to her is not easy.''

What do other actors think of her? Some wouldn't return phone calls, but one who did was Jeremy Brett: ''The first time [in 'Hedda Gabler'] , I played her rather nice, charming little husband whom she treated as a little husband; the second time [in 'The Way of the World'] , I was wooing her, so she was on her very best behavior.'' How would he say she regards other actors? As a ''necessary inconvenience.''

MORE THAN TWO hours have passed, and Dame Maggie says she must be on her way, eager, no doubt, to put consideration of the past behind her and continue readying herself for New York. How does it feel, I wonder, to be back in the world?

''It's a bit like putting one's toes in the water - a very odd feeling, very odd, indeed,'' she says, as she starts cautiously down two flights of stairs, delicately holding the railing. ''It's crazy how wary this thing makes you,'' she explains with a hushed laugh. ''You realize what you need more than anything else in this profession is health; you need great stamina to get through it.''

Outside on the street, we proceed together for a block or so before parting, and she stops to asks me when I'll next be in New York. August, perhaps, I reply. ''We'll be there,'' she says of the ''Lettice'' company, ''steaming our way through the summer.''

And as she rounds the corner to make her way home, her elongated delivery of the word ''steaming'' lingers in the night air.

A version of this article appears in print on March 18, 1990, on Page 6006036 of the National edition with the headline: THERE IS NOTHING LIKE THIS DAME. Today's Paper|Subscribe